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Black Friday |
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1995 Eivissa (Ibiza): Black Friday Friday 15 Sept 1995 Just after arriving at ECO this morning, after a slightly rushed breakfast of tea, bread with cheese and bread with peanut butter and honey, I discovered that the serial port of my PowerBook was dead. I was having trouble using my external modem, but I figured it was a loose connection somewhere and rushed off to a a morning geek meeting with David Buschman, a long-time resident (who thirty years ago lived only several hundred feed from where I now live in San Francisco). There I saw that my PowerBook couldn't talk to his Newton, and it dawned on me - ack! serial port problems. After a bit of testing I can summarize the things I can't do with my formerly-healthy serial port: I can't talk to my external modem, QuickCam video camera, my Apple QuickTake 100 digital still camera, nor to my Newton. The chances of three cables and three devices going bad all at the same time are just too slim to be seriously considered. Not having a working serial port is seriously going to hamper my three-month plan: I can't communicate my work to my publishers, I can't stay in touch with friends, and I can't take digital pictures of my travels for these web pages. I try several different pieces of software, in the vain hopes that something will just reset the state of the serial port, or bring to my attention something that I've overlooked. Apple Personal Diagnostics is worse than useless, it just eats up my time. ZTerm - my dial-up terminal emulator of choice - gives the only clue that there's something unusual going on with the signals coming through the serial port. When trying to initiate communications with my external modem, it notes that
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